Transcript Culture Lecture Slides

The difficulties become most acute when
culture shifts from something to be described,
interpreted, or explained, and is treated
instead as a source of explanation itself.
Kuper 1999: xii
Aims
► Define
Culture
► Locate the “problem”:
 Human rights “versus” Relativism
► Define
cultural relativism
► Why Anthropology?
How does this relate to
human rights?
AAA Statement of 1947
cul•ture (kul'chur), —n., v., -tured, -tur•ing.
the quality in a person or society that arises from
a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts,
letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.
2. that which is excellent in the arts, manners, etc.
3. a particular form or stage of civilization, as that of
a certain nation or period: Greek culture.
4. development or improvement of the mind by
education or training.
5. the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a
particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth
1.
culture; the drug culture.
6. Anthropol.the sum total of ways of living built up
by a group of human beings and transmitted from
one generation to another.
What can an anthropological
perspective add?

AAA Statement of 1947
– Consulted by working group for UDHR

How do we understand other peoples
practices? Can we ever judge them?
– Yes, but develop tools for studying others

Culture - central question for the discipline
– 1952 study by Alfred Kroeber and Clyde
Kluckhohn cataloged over 100 definitions of
culture
Anthropological Definitions
► That
complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
customs, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of
society – E. B. Tylor (1871)
Pre-1900 concepts of culture
► Associated
with the progressive
accumulation of the characteristic
manifestations of human creativity: art,
science, knowledge, refinement – those
things that freed man from control by
nature, by environment, by reflex, by
instinct, by habit, or by custom.
Culture and Evolution
► Culture
was NOT associated with tradition;
► Tradition was seen as weighted, limiting;
► So were custom, instinct, or temperament,
► Associated with lower evolutionary status
► AND frequently argued in RACIAL terms.
► “SCIENCE”
OF EUGENICS
Culture -> cultures
► Plural
did not appear with regularity until ~ 1910.
► Before
1910, culture =
 thought of as a stage of evolutionary development
 to be acquired;
 scholars referred to “stages of culture” or “forms of
culture.”
► What
caused this shift in how we
understand culture ?
Franz Boas
(b.1858, to U.S. 1886, d.1942)
 German immigrant
 Founder of American
Anthropology
 Research in British
Columbia among the
Kwakiutl
 Developed new
methodological tools
 Found that even
“primitive” peoples are
complex
define CULTURE
(Kroeber and Kluckhohn )
► Learned
behavior, socially transmitted and
cumulative in time;
► Rather than define culture by a single
definition, we need to consider how it
manifests, i.e. rituals, kinship networks,
social arrangements, even law;
► With culture, like life or matter, it is the
total of the varied phenomena that is
significant.
Human Rights and “relativism”
► Discussion
of culture arises from a debate about
whether human rights are universal or relative to
different cultures;
► Do
not mistakenly place universalism and
relativism in opposition to one another;
► Such
debates fail to define culture or use outdated
definitions of culture and misunderstand
“relativism” in the anthropological sense.
So how do we make sense of other
peoples’ “strange” practices?
► In
this sense, relativism is a method
► Provides
the tools for learning the internal
logics of local practices
► Ethnographic
Method (Boas)
 No more separation between person collecting
data and theorist
 Live among the people
 Learn their languages
What are those Methods?
 Understand “webs of signification” (Geertz)
 Symbols have meanings
 Find out what meanings people attribute to
symbols (including rituals, practices)
 In their own terms, contexts (ex. wink)
 Culture is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms“
 Power Relations shape ‘cultural practices’
 Colonialism
 Economy
 History
►Add in Observer’s Perspective
 we are subjective creatures
 need to develop tools that account for our
subjective positions.
We see the world the way we do not
because
that is the way it is but because we have
these ways of seeing (Wittgenstein)
 Human rights is a way of seeing
GOAL: Move away from the
dichotomy: Human rights and culture

Instead, consider human rights AS culture

HR practices ARE themselves cultural practices
founded on liberal values;

BUT, as they spread throughout the world, HR
principles gain local meanings

Just don’t forget they can be very political!
What is “human rights as
cultural practice”?
► “Human
rights have become ‘universalized’
as values subject to interpretation,
negotiation, and accommodation. They
have become ‘culture’” (Preis 1996:290).
► Complex
► Multivocal
► Intersubjective
If human rights is cultural practice,
then…
► What
does this mean for universalism?
► Shared principles?
► Consensus-based approaches to human rights?
► Can human rights be empirically-determined?
► Relativism is the “how” of universalism
 Helps us reach consensus
 By giving us methodology for understanding